A pummelling chronicle of the Mangrove Nine
Steve Mcqueen’s Mangrove (BBC One) arrives already garlanded with five-star reviews. It is the first of his Small Axe anthology set in London’s West Indian community, and was shown at film festivals earlier this year. Each of the five instalments is a two-hour film, and the BBC has committed to showing every one. Mangrove is a chronicle of racism and the black British experience, a gripping courtroom drama and a beautifully directed period piece. Watched in a packed cinema, I can imagine it is exhilarating. But as a television experience, it is pummelling.
The film dramatises the case of the Mangrove Nine, who in 1970 stood accused of incitement to riot and were acquitted in a landmark trial that acknowledged “racial hatred” in the ranks of the Metropolitan Police. Shaun Parkes gives a Bafta-worthy performance as Frank Crichlow, who opens the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill and becomes a slightly reluctant figurehead for West London’s Caribbean community.
The restaurant is repeatedly raided by police, and by one officer in particular: PC Frank Pulley, played by Sam Spruell as an evil piece of work. To illustrate the naked racism of the time: Pulley and colleagues play a card game in the station, and whoever gets the ace of spades has to go out “and nick the first black bastard they clap eyes on”.
The first hour of the drama is a scene-setter, wonderfully evocative of Notting Hill in the late 1960s, long before it was a chi-chi place of multi-million-pound houses. The second half moves to the Old Bailey, where activists Altheia Jones-lecointe (Letitia Wright) and Darcus Howe (Malachi Kirby) decide to represent themselves in rousing scenes. Kirby has done a great job of capturing Howe’s idiosyncratic speech patterns. But there are so many scenes of Jones-lecointe, Howe and his partner, Barbara Beese (Rochenda Sandall), yelling – at the police, at the legal process, at each other – that you welcome the drama’s quiet moments.
One of Mcqueen’s trademarks is his willingness to stay with a scene when other directors would cut away – here they range from Parkes raging after he is thrown in a cell, to a colander spinning on a kitchen floor in the aftermath of a police raid.
In his closing speech, Howe says the case is so important that “the history of Britain cannot now be written without it”. I’d wager that most people in this country had forgotten it or never heard of it, so the film stands as vital testament.
So here she is. Gillian Anderson as Mrs Thatcher appears early on in the opening episode of The Crown (Netflix). The series used to be about the woman who wore it; in series four, the Queen has to shove over and make space for another female leader. Or as Denis jokes: “Two menopausal women – that will be a smooth ride.”
We first encounter Thatcher as she prepares for her inaugural audience with the Queen, preserving that famous hairdo in a fug of Elnett. The Thatcher persona, we are invited to think, was part construct: a suit of armour to hide her vulnerabilities. If she expected the Queen to be regal, so did we as viewers; yet Olivia Colman appears to be playing her more like Private Eye’s Brenda, giddily ticking off a list of Cabinet predictions as if she was a housewife doing the Pools.
Their meeting is enjoyable, but the dramatic heft of the first episode comes from the IRA’S murder of Lord Mountbatten of Burma (a classy performance, as ever, from Charles Dance). In every series of The Crown there is an issue of questionable taste – remember the episode in which a young Prince Philip was more or less accused of facilitating the death of his sister in a plane crash? – and here it is writer Peter Morgan’s decision to overlay Mountbatten’s funeral with an IRA diatribe describing him as “the ultimate symbol of imperialist oppression” and crowing about the killings. While it provides context for younger viewers coming to the story for the first time, it feels disrespectful.
But overall, Morgan gives us a solid opener to the season. The Mountbatten story is a way of introducing the other theme that will run alongside the Queen-thatcher relationship: the love triangle between Charles, Camilla and Diana. The first meeting between the Prince of Wales and the schoolgirl Lady Diana Spencer is quirky: shy Diana dressed as a “mad tree” for ballet practice, hiding behind a pot plant. It is almost the last time we’ll see them so happy in each other’s company.
Read reviews of every episode of the fourth series of The Crown at telegraph.co.uk/the-crown
Small Axe: Mangrove ★★★★ The Crown ★★★★